Is POE2 doing that well?!

I haven't really been following things as of late due to real life stuff but a couple of days ago I decided to hop back into POE 1 after I saw the new league stuff. I am sorely disappointed. The game performance is so bad on console that it's nearly unplayable but I see the same is happening on the PC side:

- Textures loading in then reloading in
- Sound is either out of sync, barely audible, or stuttering
- Stutters and stops in frame rate
- Outright crashing

It's pretty clear they've turned development over to the second string and new hires for POE 1 and have the veteran talent on POE 2. I would like to think that GGG thought all this out before hand and made the correct resourcing decisions at the start but it doesn't seem that way and now we're paying for it. I see a lot of attempted damage control on their side but this isn't a good look and I don't even want to bother now. Is that why nearly all the content creators for POE 1 are showing old gameplay footage?

POE1 has had a reputation of poor optimization and zero visual clarity for many years, way before the release of POE2. Of course further diversion of limited development resources will likely mean that these issues will never be seriously addressed/fixed.

The main issue is that you receive ZERO gameplay benefit for dumping big money into improving your computer hardware. Both POE1 and POE2 models and environments are designed top down to have zero visual clarity. Everything melds into everything else in every situation. Twilight strand shows this immediately in POE1. The swamp intro area also shows this immediately in POE2.

Would you like to have zero visual clarity at 30 FPS at more pixelated settings or 60 FPS at less pixelated settings? You still have zero idea of what is happening on your screen.

D3 gets a lot of hate on these forums but go look at an average gameplay video of endgame greater rifting (timed trial mode with increasing difficulty) and compare the graphical design to both POE1 and POE2. Everything is well optimized with good contrast and color choices. In most cases there a death log feature would not be necessary because you can realize within a few seconds what killed you and where you made mistakes.